I like your ship idea a lot. It looks to me like there was a base hull that over the years had a lot of additions organically welded on and a lot of repairs made.

But, the shader you use looks much too plastic for me to find this believable. Specifically, it looks like a rather small piece of plastic when given the scale I feel the ship is rather meant to be enormous. If this is supposed to be a metal ship (which I suspect from the color) I would make the shader more metallic (decrease roughness to sharpen specular highlights, and possibly increase reflectivity depending how much you like chrome). Maybe also add some rusty patches and small scratches, rivets all over. If it is supposed to be an organic ship I would take some inspiration from an old whale's skin, a lot of small surface details and long scratch scars, etc. You have ZBrush, you should be able to paint some nice base color.

Basically this is very nice but the shader and lack of tiny surface details is taking away a lot from the sense of size.

But, the shader you use looks much too plastic for me to find this believable. Specifically, it looks like a rather small piece of plastic when given the scale I feel the ship is rather meant to be enormous. If this is supposed to be a metal ship (which I suspect from the color) I would make the shader more metallic (decrease roughness to sharpen specular highlights, and possibly increase reflectivity depending how much you like chrome). Maybe also add some rusty patches and small scratches, rivets all over. If it is supposed to be an organic ship I would take some inspiration from an old whale's skin, a lot of small surface details and long scratch scars, etc. You have ZBrush, you should be able to paint some nice base color.

Basically this is very nice but the shader and lack of tiny surface details is taking away a lot from the sense of size.

The thing is I scapped the zbrush texture because it looked bad upclose. 4k was not enough. Reflectivity and specular are both on 1- and roughness is 0.22. I tried to replicate the old Alien movie miniature feeling. Sadly without this plastic-y reflection all the detail disappears. This is the first render: with the 4k zbrush texture mapAnd the second is the procedural map but with high roughness reflection.

Roughness on 0.22 is too high for a metallic I think in the TG shader. Look here for some examples of how the roughness varies with specular. Even 0.1 looks still too high for me. The matte version honestly doesn't look all that bad either though, it has kind of the look of old peeling paint and rust.

I really like the way the colors look on your original base texture. It's too bad about the export size. A lot of the fine detail in ZBrush is just gone in the TG render.

Quote from: agent_unawares on September 18, 2017, 03:09:48 pmRoughness on 0.22 is too high for a metallic I think in the TG shader. Look here for some examples of how the roughness varies with specular. Even 0.1 looks still too high for me. The matte version honestly doesn't look all that bad either though, it has kind of the look of old peeling paint and rust.

I really like the way the colors look on your original base texture. It's too bad about the export size. A lot of the fine detail in ZBrush is just gone in the TG render.

I know how it works in TG. But metallic is usually a different type of shader, it can be rough, or shiny , doesn't matter. I'm experimenting with a 8k texture map , with a stronger burnt AO texture-.

Yes, I am only referring to the final appearance of the material not the shader language. It just looks more plastic than metallic to me at those settings. Probably there's a way to make it still look metallic even with fuzzy highlights, I just don't know how in TG. I am interested to see how the 8K version turns out.

Quote from: agent_unawares on September 18, 2017, 04:13:18 pmYes, I am only referring to the final appearance of the material not the shader language. It just looks more plastic than metallic to me at those settings. Probably there's a way to make it still look metallic even with fuzzy highlights, I just don't know how in TG. I am interested to see how the 8K version turns out.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of plastic-or rather any highlights. It's often overdone in moves etc. But after experimenting it looked like a rough reflection is the only way to bring back the details that are missing due to the way terragen renders objects. I was disappointed how much of the original detail is just gone on the TG render. The first few renders looked like a piece of wood, or rock instead of a detailed spaceship. So it was just an "artistic choice". Now I'm rendering a 18 million poly building ,with the AO map used as a reflection image in TG. We'll see.